Dhel

Dhel is what you call somebody out of Peredhel. It is a nationality and nothing more: a Dhel may be Peren, human, hobgoblin or anything else that country governs, and a Peren born in Idir or in Amulta is no Dhel at all. Peredhel’s own answer to the question is Dhel or Peren, depending on who is asking, which is exactly how the two words came to be used as though they were one. Speakers slide between them inside a single sentence and correct themselves afterward, or do not.

Mikhail Kethrel is the one who has drawn the line plainly, and he is also the one it costs. When people speak ill of the Dhel, he says, they are talking about people like him, and not only about Peren.

The Word

It is an insult, and not only in Idir. Leon Yaegar, Peren of Peredhel, used it of his own people in front of company and named it what it was in the saying: the cuss word, the derogatory term. Nothing softer has ever been offered in its place. Whether the Dhel have a name for themselves that is not one was never written down. The nearest thing to it is that Peredhel folk call themselves Peren, which is the race and not the country.

In Idir it is said the way a man says a thing he has already decided. One trader allowed that they did not much want to deal with them sorts, Dhel as they are, and then the face dropped and the eyes narrowed: you’re not Dhel, are you. Those nasty Dhel, from another. He never trusted Dhel, from a third. The only thing dirtier than a null bite is a goddamn Dhel, in Forven. Most people hate the Dhel but money is money, from a man taking their coin anyway. Dhel leaves a sour taste in your mouth that no amount of whiskey gets out.

Two things feed it. The first is chains: in Peredhel people are kept in them openly, mandated from the top down, and Idir prides itself on being the opposite sort of place. The second is the border. The ice wall on the Yovincia and Amulta line stands where it stands to hold back Dhel armies, weapons have been forged specifically for fighting the Dhel and their allies, and in Idir the joke is that one day we will all be Peren, one day we will all be Dhel. It is not a very funny joke. It is a looming and constant doom over the head of any native Idiran, and it is told anyway.

The Dhel as a Place

The word does not stay a demonym. Going east you find yourself in the Dhel. There are the edges of the Dhel, and the wall of the Dhel, which is not easily surmounted, and country you have to pass through the Dhel to reach, and a man may say he will spend some time in the Dhel looking for a thing. When the people became the ground was never written down.

It has quarters, and each quarter has a voice. North Dhel has an accent, South Dhel has an accent, East and West Dhel have their own, and a man whose speech is a blend of two can be placed to a corner of the country by ear alone. Past all of them is beyond the Dhel, which is its own answer to the question of where somebody is from. A captain in Forven was placed there by ear and no closer.

What Marks One Out

There is no Dhel face, and there cannot be one. Peredhel is more than half Peren and it is not only Peren. What people actually read is dress, bearing, coin and voice. Their money is called Dhel gold and reckoned in it by foreign merchants. The bastard sword is known abroad as their national weapon. During the riots in Haudh-Gwenn the crowds went for anyone wealthy and Dhel-looking, which is a thing a crowd should not be able to see, and what it was seeing was never written down.

Peredhel does everything in threes: three choices at In Ikhtar, three Tarumbar over nine provinces, three regions to a province. Phil Nye, hiring a Free Folk sword for the road west, thought their habit of hiring out in threes came a little too close to the Dhel way of things, and asked where the other two were. Koa Attila told him he had traveled in four.

Campaign Updates

There is one Dhel institution inside Idir and it exists because people left Peredhel. Vigil was founded about a hundred and twenty-five years ago by émigrés, a schism of the Dhel led out over a grave, and it has kept itself walled and hidden ever since.

The rumor that Mikhail is Dhel began to propagate around the time the company reached Ostrad, whose aged captain turned out to be ex-Dhel military herself. By the time it reached Haudh-Gwenn it had acquired a moral: he cannot be trusted, because who knows what he carries back to his precious Princes. He has denied it in the third person and been mildly entertained that it took root at all. He still wears his goddess’s holy symbol inside the sleeve rather than on it, which is what a man does in Idir when the goddess is Peredhel’s.

Beltran Grayeras has been buying Peredhel adventurers and mercenaries to train and lead his army, though not, by one account, Dhel officers. Among the hires was Venros, a Dhel enchanter and mind-mage brought in about a fortnight before anyone noticed and set to watch the watchers. He was killed by the company. At the Martyr’s festival, meanwhile, Elliot and Cleven Gemsmith danced a customary Dhel dance, and Mikhail turned out to know it too.

More recently Mikhail recognized a public display of the dead as a Dhel method. He did not explain what the method is.